underlying difficulty--or that aspect of it which is still worth considering? We may grant, in the first place, to Mandeville, that, in point of fact, the construction of a civilised society presupposes the development of numerous desires, many of which are more or less condemned by severe moralists. If the savage comes to value blue paint, he may take to planting something to exchange for it, instead of simply lying on his back to digest his last handful of acorns; and, in so doing, he makes the first step towards the development of an industrial system. The desire for wealth is, of course, implied in all stages of progress if men are to create wealth; and we can partly answer Mandeville's paradox by throwing over the ascetic and declaring that a desire for good meat, and fire, and clothes, even for pictures, and books, and music, or for such comforts as most of us enjoy, is not in itself immoral; and that, on the contrary, the more there is of such enjoyment the better for men's bodies and minds, and therefore, on the whole, the better for their morality. But the moral difficulty returns in a new shape. The desire for wealth, let us say, is not in itself bad; it is simply natural--it is a desire for one essential condition of a tolerably happy life. But is it not bad, in so far as it is selfish? Do not the desires which have been the mainspring of all modern development imply a desire of each man to get rich at the expense of others? Have they not been the source of all that division between rich and poor which makes one side luxurious and the other miserable? Has not Dives become rich and bloated by force of the very same process which has made Lazarus a mass of sores and misery? Suppress the desire for wealth, and we should still be savages "running wild in woods". But was not even the noble savage better than the pauper who now hangs on to the fringes of society? and is his existence compensated by the existence of other classes who have more wealth than they can use? And so the old problem comes back; and we have, as of old, the most contradictory answers to the problem.